Take a trip across an impossible virtual reality-inspired landscape in a scene from the Canadian artist’s latest feature.
In this extract from Jon Rafman’s new film Minor Daemon: Volume 1, the protagonist travels from the farthest reaches of space and time, across an arid planet populated by wild beasts towards an impossible landscape filled with floating islands. It follows the narrative and structural logic of a video game – appropriate considering the film’s premise, which sees two virtual reality gaming-obsessed men trying to secure their freedom as they journey through a Hieronymus Bosch-like hellscape.
Minor Daemon, which is currently showing at London’s 180 Studios, builds on Rafman’s earlier work, from his early experiments in Second Life through to the animated project that saw him weaving his own dream journals into an epic feature film. The world of Minor Daemon is Rafman’s most outlandish to date, a computer-generated fever-dream universe that drawing on the landscapes of online worlds to examine the relationship between technology and social consciousness.
Tickets for Minor Daemon are available now from the 180 The Strand website. The presentation at 180 Studios coincides with a solo exhibition of Jon Rafman’s work at Sprüth Magers, London (3 February – 25 March 2023).
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